


Left-Coiled Love

by thatoldbroad



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017) RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crack, M/M, Nothing Hurts, So it's only slightly AU, Timmy and Armie are snails
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-12 07:51:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16869049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatoldbroad/pseuds/thatoldbroad
Summary: Armie is a left-coiled snail that can mate only with another left-coiled snail. Enter Timmy.My modest contribution for the holidays. Thank you, fandom!





	Left-Coiled Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CristinaSea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CristinaSea/gifts), [etal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/etal/gifts).



> Dear friends Cristinasea and Etal, happy holidays! Thank you for the constant support and the LAUGHS. And to all who read my stories, THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart. The second part will be posted by Christmas. 
> 
> Inspired by this episode of This Is Love, a podcast that features real life fluff if you’re ever down and need a pick me up: https://www.thisislovepodcast.com/episode-9-one-in-a-million.
> 
> And by the real-life story of Jeremy the Snail, except there will be no snail deaths in this story.
> 
> And if you’re like the author and actually get kinda skeeved out by snails, here are the cartoon versions I had in my head while writing this:  
> Armie: https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/snail-with-a-flower-in-its-mouth-vector-808247  
> Timmy: https://www.canstockphoto.com/snail-cartoon-25620744.html  
> Lefty (in Armie’s eyes): https://www.shutterstock.com/ko/image-vector/cartoon-illustration-snail-grumpy-expression-250154143?src=MBoB9qvXZhD3H_NiI77bdQ-1-47

It was over a shared breakfast of clover leaf, eggshells, and cuttlebone that Armie learned about exactly how Lefty came to live with him.

“He did what?” Armie exclaimed, horrified. 

Apparently, his human, Luca, had sent a tweet to his hundreds of followers. Specifically, a personal ad. For Armie: _Lovely lefty looking for mate #SnailLove._

“I was not!” Armie said, thoroughly offended. He was perfectly content with his chosen bachelor life, thank you very much. And neither was he lovely. He was masculine and tall, sturdy for a snail of his species, and his shell had well-earned callouses from all his rigorous climbing and adventuring. He also made certain to roll around in fungus-rich soil every night to get that rugged look that he’s perfected over the years. So lovely he was not; studly was more like it.

“Then he posted a video,” Lefty said. “You were in it.”

“How? I don’t remember . . . oh. Oh no.” Armie did suddenly recall that afternoon Luca had woken him from a deep sleep. An odd thing, it occurred to Armie at the time, but he had been too groggy to pay much attention to what Luca was doing, or care why he was taking Armie out. Armie chalked it up to a Luca quirk, and he had many, including skulking around the tank late at night, flashlight held under his shirt to dim its illumination, as if Armie didn’t have a pair of eyes with perfect vision and couldn’t see exactly what he was up to. Silly human. But it only dawned on him now why Luca was creeping. The pervert. “What did he do?”

“It wasn’t what he did, but what he said. And the better question is, what _didn’t_ he say?” 

Which unfortunately didn’t include a lecture on The Secret Sex Lives of Snails.

“They mate in face-to-face position,” Luca told the millions who were watching. According to Lefty, the video went viral within hours. “Imagine two cars passing each other, driving in opposite directions. As long as they have steering wheels on the same side, then they can pass a package between them, across the middle of the road. But if one has the driving wheel on the other side, it won’t work."

__

__

It meant that Armie, being a left-coiling snail whose “steering wheel” (“what a ridiculous euphemism,” Armie grumbled) was on the left side, could breed only with another left-coiling snail, if _breeding_ was the goal, which had never been for Armie. Ask Elizabeth, his long-time girlfriend, who, after a year and a half of monogamous bliss had to ruin it by demanding that they reproduce. As in, Armie should reproduce since he was also equipped with girl parts, just as Elizabeth was equipped with boy parts. And why should the snail with the girl name have to grow the eggs each fucking time, Elizabeth reasoned. _Do you know what it does to a snail’s body to shit eighty fucking eggs at once? Because, by the way, that’s how it feels._ Fair enough, but Armie wasn’t interested in being a mother or a father, and neither did Elizabeth make the birthing process especially tempting, so that was that. But they did stay friends and--

“And I’ve gone entirely off topic,” Armie told Lefty. “The point is--how fucking rude of him.” 

“Indeed,” Lefty agreed. He chewed with his mouth open and Armie could see bits of cuttlebone caught in his teeth. That and how persistently he stank of that particularly revolting cuisine were only two reasons why he and Armie would never work. But that had been the plan. Because in Luca’s primitive human mind, all that it should take for two left-coiling snails to make babies is to be _in the same tank_. As if by being left-coiled they were guaranteed a fit. As if attraction or love was predestined by a genetic trait. 

Not so in Armie’s experience. And he has had experience, plenty of it, including with left-coilers, despite Luca’s dramatic claim that to turn out left was a “one in a million” chance. _Please._ Just because the man hadn’t come across a lefty until Armie in his “twenty plus years of gardening” didn’t mean they hardly existed. They just knew how to hide better than their right-coiled counterparts. Certainly, to burrow deeper than the pile of compost in Luca’s bin, where Armie had dawdled so that he could be found, angling then for an early retirement in a massive luxury tank--specifically the one he spied through Luca’s window and that took up nearly an entire room. 

Lefty's owner had answered the ad and offered Lefty, on loan. 

Armie frowned. Lefty was doing that full-body wiggly thing he did after he finished a meal. Like he was preparing for a poop. Good grief. There were leaves to hide behind for that sort of activity.

“Lefty! Go do that over there.” Armie pointed to a thick cropping of basil. Not Armie’s favorite to eat, but he liked its scent. And maybe if Lefty dragged himself through it, he’d come away smelling less . . . repulsive.

“Thank you, my friend, but I’m perfectly fine here.”

And that would be reason number three for why Armie would _never_ , even if Lefty was the last snail on earth.

But he could still fuck with Luca.

After Lefty finished his business, Armie inched toward him, careful to slither around the green gob clumped near his foot. Luca was approaching their tank, on tiptoe, flashlight stuffed under his shirt, and Armie counted down--five, four, three, two . . . . On one, he tipped his shell left to knock against Lefty’s. Then he _undulated_.

“Wh-what!” Lefty sputtered. “What are you doing?”

And Armie had a moment to think-- _Why is he recoiling? I’m hot!_ \--before Luca’s big human head was hanging above the tank, face expectant and full of hope. Lefty’s baffling reaction would have to be pondered later. Right now, they had a scene to execute.

“Play along!” Armie hissed. “Let’s give him a show.”

“A show? You mean act like we're--” A wicked grin spread across Lefty’s face. “Tit for tat, eh?”

“Exactly.”

And so it went. For three months, Armie and Lefty pretended to flirt, preened at each other, banged their shells, and _writhed_ suggestively, when the moment called for it, when it seemed natural and appropriate. And throughout, Luca watched, eager and keen, but walked away each time disappointed when no egg-laying seemed to be imminent.

The rest of life went on as it did before, in peaceful cohabitation. 

Then Timmy arrived.

Luca gently set him on top of a small hill, from which he promptly tumbled and landed at the bottom, shell-side to the ground and foot to the sky. He giggled. “Ooopsie!”

Tiny. Big-eyed. A shell the color of sunrise. And a _lefty_. Timmy was--

“Lovely,” Armie and Lefty said at the same. Their eyes met. And a war began.

**Author's Note:**

> Also inspired by two of my favorite stories in any fandom, Other Crabs Cannot Be Trusted by Groovyphilia and Little Birds by Winterhill. If you read them or have read them, please have mercy on mine, which is not nearly as brilliant or imaginative, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.
> 
> (Also, I felt weirdly rushed to get this story out, thinking: what if someone else writes a snailAU?! They'll think I've copied! Stranger things have gone through my mind.)


End file.
